Frank OrdoÃ±ez / The Post-StandardAn Tran fled his native Vietnam and spent time in the Netherlands before arriving in Syracuse in 1987. He attended Onondaga Community College and earned an electrical engineering degree from Clarkson University. He teaches math skills to refugees at St. John the Evangelist Church.

When St. John the Evangelist Church, the 157-year-old cornerstone of Syracuse’s Roman Catholic history, holds its last Mass today, it will be unlike any other in the diocese: a bilingual, English-Vietnamese service to accommodate its unique congregation.

The church will close Wednesday. The diocese will try to sell it, as it did the rectory in 2006.

The closing marks the end of a rich history as a center for many of Syracuse’s North Side Catholics and as a refuge for immigrants — from Ireland in the late 1800s and, most recently, from Southeast Asia. Parish membership now counts some 300 Vietnamese-born families and 125 U.S.-born families.

“I feel like it’s my home,” said Anthony Phan, the parish’s Vietnamese representative. “Our community is so vibrant and spirited. It takes so long to build community. I hate to see people spread all over the place.”

The closing will save the diocese at least $100,000 a year, said Monsignor Neal Quartier, rector at both the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and St. John the Evangelist.

It is but one more in a series of diocesan closings brought on by lack of money, lack of priests and nuns and dwindling membership. In Onondaga County, 21 Roman Catholic churches have closed or merged. More will. What’s unusual about St. John is that it stayed open this long.

Thirty years ago its closing seemed imminent. Interstate 81 construction had leveled nearby neighborhoods in downtown Syracuse. Traffic on the elevated highway roared past just 20 yards from the church’s sanctuary. Former parishioners were moving to suburbs. In 1968, when the diocese closed its first Catholic school in Syracuse, it was St. John the Evangelist Catholic Academy, a school with a 75-year history.

But unexpectedly, after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, a Southeast Asian immigrant wave brought St. John’s a second wind.

"It was a parish in the middle of nowhere,” said the Rev. Thomas Fitzpatrick, pastor from 1977 to 1990. “The church was in poor repair. The population was elderly.”

Fitzpatrick remembers the first refugee knocking on the rectory door, a Hmong from Laos seeking food.

“I had never heard of Hmong before,” said Fitzpatrick, then in his early 40s. “I had not a clue what they ate or where they were coming from.”

For Fitzpatrick and the church’s then-pastoral associate, Sister Judith Howley, the Hmong, the Vietnamese and, most recently, the Burmese were simply people in need.

“We worked with everybody, right from the beginning,” Fitzpatrick said. “It didn’t matter if you were Catholic, Buddhist or Animist.”

Thirty years later, Sister Judith, 69, runs the Asian Apostolate, housed in St. John the Evangelist church basement. Sparkling-eyed and quick to laugh, she’s there nearly every day, helping new refugees fill out paperwork, registering children for school and arranging funerals.

Recently, she arrived home from work to a phone message from a Burmese priest, who for the first time had come to Syracuse to say Mass that evening at the apartment of a Burmese family.

“So over I went,” she said. “We were squished like sardines for a Mass that was absolutely wonderful. The people were so happy.”

Through the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of immigrants streamed through, coming by way of the U.S. Catholic Conference and Catholic Charities. Fitzpatrick and Howley enlisted parishioners, then people from all over Central New York, to provide clothing, furniture and food. They helped refugees learn English, enroll in schools and get medical care. A plastic surgeon, Arthur Lehrman, mended war scars. A dentist, Howard Roswick, replaced missing teeth. Nearby affordable housing, St. Joseph’s Hospital and Peter’s IGA grocery store were all within walking distance.

The once-fading parish, newly focused on refugees, renewed itself. Someone left the parish $500,000 in a will.

The parish council, which included lawyers, a banker and a financial planner, helped raise more money. The church was given long-needed repairs. When workers tore out walls, out poured coal dust from decades of passing trains, Fitzpatrick said.

On nights, after construction workers went home, Hmong cleaned it up.

“Everything just fell in place,” he said. “The people of St. John’s welcomed them with open arms. It gave the parish a new purpose. A parish has to have a purpose.”

View full sizeDick Blume / The Post-StandardSt. John the Evangelist Church, on North State and Willow Streets in Syracuse, opened 157 years ago.

"Four Masses a Sunday"

In some ways, the renewal wasn’t so different from the church’s beginnings in the 1850s, when Irish immigrants built the stone church at the junction of the Erie and Oswego canals. At the city’s then-crossroads of commerce, St. John the Evangelist became the first cathedral for the Diocese of Syracuse.

But by the early 1970s, the St. John congregation was dwindling and with it, the money to support its magnificent buildings.

“If not for the refugees, the church would have closed way before now,” Fitzpatrick said.

Other North Side churches — Holy Trinity, St. Stephen and St. Peter — already have.

At its peak, the Catholic diocese had 12 churches in less than four square miles on the North Side. Some were just blocks apart, each founded by a different European immigrant community.

Before and during the Asian immigration, parishioners like Janet Frantz helped keep St. John the Evangelist going. Frantz, 68, graduated from St. John high school with a class of 35. She helped organize the parish’s 150th anniversary celebrations in 2003 and its alumni dinner last weekend. To attend Mass at St. John every Sunday, she drives nine miles from her Liverpool home.

“I pass a lot of churches to come here,” she said.

For her, St. John the Evangelist is steeped in memories.

“Mass was always crowded,” she said. “You had to get there early. Four Masses a Sunday. Double parking on State Street.”

High school dances were held under the mirrored, rotating ceiling light that’s still in the basement. Mothers served English muffins with tomato sauce and cheese, and kept an eye on their teenagers.

“It’s very emotional,” Frantz said of the closing.

A home in America

In unpredictable ways, St. John kept adapting.

Under Fitzpatrick, the State Street rectory became a kind of short-term shelter, where some refugees became like family. In 1989, through a connection with surgeon Lehrman, two Afghan freedom fighters and an Afghan boy stayed a few weeks at the rectory. One was missing a leg, another an eye, the boy a hand. Their first night, they all attended a Syracuse University basketball game in a raucous Carrier Dome.

It took a while to realize a lot of refugees were staying. Many moved on — the Hmong to Minnesota and California, Vietnamese to Georgia. But other Vietnamese, the bulk of refugees from that period, stayed and established lives in Syracuse. Fitzpatrick, now pastor at Our Lady of Lourdes, learned Vietnamese to say Mass. Older Vietnamese took work in factories and with cleaning services. Young and old benefited from after-school and evening education programs at St. John the Evangelist.

An Tran was 29 when he arrived in the U.S. He’d fled Vietnam on an overcrowded boat, was rescued by a Dutch freighter and spent seven years in the Netherlands. In the U.S. he learned English, attended Onondaga Community College and obtained an electrical engineering degree from Clarkson University. He has been teaching basic and high level mathematics at St. John for years, a position paid for by Catholic Charities.

“More than a dozen of my students have been valedictorians at local high schools,” he said.

The parish was a haven for him from the start.

“I found comfort here, for the first time in America,” he said.

View full sizeFrank Ordoñez / The Post-Standard"The people of St. John's welcomed them with open arms," the Rev. Thomas Fitzpatrick said about the stream of refugees. The congregation helped the immigrants get settled, and the immigrants helped keep the congregation vibrant. "It gave the parish a new purpose. A parish has to have a purpose," said Fitzpatrick, who learned the Mass in Vietnamese.

Fitzpatrick said they never proselytized. But inspired by the work and example of
Fitzpatrick and Sister Judith, some Vietnamese converted to Catholicism.

Alison Ha, now an assistant vice president at HSBC Bank in Syracuse, was a Buddhist when she arrived with her family in Syracuse at age 13. She majored in economics at Union College, and became a Catholic at age 20. Fitzpatrick baptized her. Sister Judith is her godmother.

“My success has always been because of their work and their efforts,” she said.

In 2005, the diocese ordained its first Vietnamese-born priest, the Rev. Thienan Tran, who arrived in Syracuse as a teenager in 1992. For the last two years, Tran has been celebrating Sunday Mass in Vietnamese at St. John.

The diocese plans to move the Asian Apostolate, with its tutoring and after-school program, to Our Lady of Pompei Church, a half-mile away. Tran plans to celebrate Vietnamese Mass there.

But the move leaves many uncertain. Diocesan officials said they’ll close more nearby churches, but have not yet identified which ones.

In August 2009, Bishop Robert J. Cunningham wrote diocesan Catholics a letter noting the inevitable need for consolidating churches.

“On the north side of the City of Syracuse, about 16,000 people attended Mass at six parishes during the 1960s,” he wrote. “Today with those same parishes still open, the total number of people attending Mass there ... is approximately 2,000.”

In another letter in December, he said Holy Trinity would close in February and St. John at the end of June. He urged members of Church of the Assumption, Our Lady of Pompei and St. John the Baptist — all on the North Side — to come up with a consolidation plan by March. It’s almost July and there’s still no plan.

Phan expects the Vietnamese community will largely disperse, with people attending whichever church is closest.

Frantz expects she’ll still drive to Syracuse to attend Mass at the Cathedral, where she was baptized.

“It would be so easy to go out here in Liverpool,” she said. “But I know in a few years they’ll be closing and merging churches out there. I don’t want to be in a situation where every couple of years I’m shopping for a parish. I know the Cathedral will always be here. It has to be.”